Beijing (AFP)
By banning the download of WeChat and TikTok applications in the United States from Sunday, US President Donald Trump is stepping up his standoff with China, while negotiations with the Chinese parent company of TikTok to sell its activities on American soil to an American group trample.
- What is WeChat?
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Known as Weixin in Mandarin, WeChat has over 1 billion monthly active users.
They are predominantly Chinese even though the application is available in nearly twenty languages.
It is an instant messaging system launched in 2011 and originally offering features similar to the American WhatsApp (exchange of texts, photos and videos).
Since then, a very wide range of services have been integrated into the application, which today is more of an ecosystem: payment by phone (online or in-store via a barcode system), news feed, reservations. hotels or travel, video games, online finance ...
It is owned by Tencent, one of the Chinese digital giants and the undisputed leader in smartphone video games.
The first Asian group to be valued at more than 500 billion dollars, in 2017, Tencent competed with Facebook in terms of stock market weight.
The private group based in Hong Kong is now valued at 686 billion dollars, while Facebook weighs him 756 billion dollars.
Tencent owns shares in many US companies, including electric car maker Tesla, social network Snap, and prominent video game developers like Riot Games, Epic Games, and Activision Blizzard.
- Monitoring on WeChat -
The WeChat platform censors content for all users registered with a Chinese phone number, even if they are traveling abroad or changing to an international number, according to a 2016 study from the University of Toronto.
In May, another report from the same university said accounts that were not registered in China were still subject to "ubiquitous content monitoring."
In the name of stability, it is common in China for internet giants to remove content considered politically sensitive, and to block Western sites like Facebook, Twitter and the New York Times.
WeChat's privacy policy states that users' information can be shared "as necessary", including with the state, to "comply with a legal obligation or procedures".
- TikTok, 2 billion downloads -
Dances or songs in playback, filmed challenges, absurd or humorous scenes: the application for sharing short videos has conquered teenagers around the world.
TikTok passed the milestone of 2 billion downloads worldwide in April since its launch in 2017, according to the Sensor Tower firm, when a large part of humanity was confined due to Covid-19.
TikTok is the international version of the Douyin application (its name in Mandarin), intended for the Chinese market only.
Both belong to the private group ByteDance, founded in Beijing in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, a computer engineer by training.
The application is very successful, especially in the United States and Indonesia, but it is one of 59 Chinese mobile applications recently banned by India due to concerns for national security and the protection of privacy.
- Distancing yourself from China -
TikTok withdrew from Hong Kong shortly after China imposed a new security law there giving police increased powers to censor the internet - a departure analysts see as an effort to avoid suspicion of scrutiny by the Chinese authorities.
But the app has been accused of privacy breaches, however.
President Donald Trump has given his parent company, ByteDance, until September 20 to sell his TikTok activities on American soil to a "made in US" company.
© 2020 AFP